Will Thalheimer and Stella Collins define learning and its value to the organisation.
Will Thalheimer and Stella Collins define learning and its value to the organisation.
Welcome to the stellar labs podcast, future learning today at Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable, engaging training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts, you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training, they'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future. With you, keep listening to start your future learning here today. Welcome back to the Stellar labs podcast, where we talk about all things learning and lots of things technology based too. Today, I'm talking to Will Talheimer, who is president of work learning research, and has been one of my heroes for a really long time. Well, it's fantastic to have you here. Welcome.
Will:Thank you, Stella. I am delighted to be here.
Stella:So we're just going to have a bit of a chat really. I'm really curious as to your thoughts about learning. I know you are very keen on making sure that we use evidence based learning, research based evidence for learning but I'm really curious to find out, first of all, what is learning to you?
Will:Such a deep question. Thank you for putting me on the spot. No, it's a great question. In some sense, when people learn they're sort of changing their cognitive structures, their knowledge base, they're changing the way they think about things. But learning is a funny word. Sometimes we think about learning as a process. Sometimes we think about learning as the product of that process, and there's a lot of confusion around that and it doesn't really matter. I remember this great quote by BF Skinner:"education is what remains after what has been learnt has been forgotten". I'm not really sure I know what that means, but it kind of makes you think, so you know, in our fielld, in the L&D field, when we think of learning, we often think about is somebody gaining some new information or skills or abilities or motivation that will help them perform better in their work, or sometimes more broadly we think in their lives as well. And I think that's a fairly straightforward definition that we can use that will guide us in our deliberations about how we design, how we develop, how we implement learning. Does that make sense? What am I left out? I mean, you know, I'd love your perspectives as well.
Stella:For me, I'm really intrigued at the moment about sort of what I see as almost two sorts of learning. In fact, there's probably three. One is the learning we do as children, which is very much developmental and we almost can't help but do that. It's kind of genetically programmed. We're going to learn to speak a language. We're going to learn to walk. We're going to learn to work with other people. Then you've got the learning that is, you know, you need to learn some skills. You need to have some fundamental skills in life from tying your shoe laces to cybersecurity specialist. And I think that's a slightly different sort of learning to the other sort of learning that we tend to do at work, which is based around the experiences we have and the people we become. And I think some of them are often delivered formally. Some of them are informally and really what you're really looking for is a really good blend, but I'm kind of interested in this, you know, are we looking at learning as what we see what we learned from our experience, but how is that different from what we learn, because we need to have some kind of skill for something and how do they all fit together?
Will:Oh yeah. And it's really complex, right? Because sometimes we learn unintentionally. We don't even try to learn. We are just, you know, human beings, and perhaps all animals to some extent are pattern recognizers. We have to look out into our environment. Not only look visually, but hear and sense as well, and sort of make sense of that and then sort of develop an understanding of what it means. Like if you are a morning dove and you see a shadow above you, could be a Hawk, you might need to get the hell out of there. Right. If you're a human being and you see somebody's expression change on their face to something more worried, you have to recognize that and be able to think about, well, what does that mean? And that has a lot of that happens automatically without our conscious knowledge, you know, you hear about this mirroring other people. Like if you're talking to someone and they're folding their arms, you might fold your arms as well. And you don't do this consciously. Now some people do it consciously, but most of us do it unconsciously. So what is that? We've clearly learned that, but that's not intentional. It's not conscious. Learning is very complex cause we're not just learning about skills and knowledge and that kind of thing. We're learning about emotions and really deep patterns. And sometimes we don't even recognize what we're learning. So yeah, it's really kind of wondrous when you think about it.
Stella:It's amazing. But what we do learn is incredible and what we avoid learning sometimes I think sometimes we try really hard not to learn something and there may be times when we really want to learn something, but actually it's really, really difficult.
Will:Oh, absolutely. And then there's habits, you know, there's a lot of talk now about habits and how human beings are not as proactive as we'd like to think of ourselves that we are cued or prompted or nudged by environmental cues. So for example, I'm in the middle of cleaning our washing machine out. Cause it's got a little mold in it and I just sprayed some ice propyl alcohol on it like half an hour ago. And I'm gonna let it sit there. But then I thought to myself, well, I need to remind myself that I did that. So I took the bottle of ice propyl alcohol. I put it on the bottom of the stairs, the bottom of my office. So when I walk out to go to lunch, I'll remember, Oh, I've got to go finish that job. So that kind of prompting mechanism is a really valuable. I remember this other type of memory called prospective memory and there's actually research on this, but it's the memory to do something. A lot of what we do in our work as learning professionals is to help people think about what they're g oing t o do in the future. And that perspective memory is sort of what we want them. If they're a manager in a meeting, we want them to remember that they need to get the buy in of everybody to get the ideas from everyone, to design the meeting and talk about things in a way that inspires other people to share and to generate ideas, e t c etera. So that perspective memory idea is really valuable. You know, I've been talking about two types of memory that we do in training and development and I'm certainly oversimplifying, but one is what I call transfer learning. And what that means is that we are transferring knowledge from an instructor to our learners or from a body of materials saying that an eLearning course or a book or whatever to our learners. So the knowledge gets transferred, understood processed, that kind of thing. But there's another kind of learning I think is really valuable. And we don't really think about this and I call it insight learning. So if we have an insight about something, you know, all of a sudden we think, Oh my gosh, I never thought of it that way, that is learning. Now, oftentimes we as trainers o r instructional designers, learning architects, we don't design that into our program. C ause we're thinking transfer learning. We're thinking about what can I get them to know? Right. We have these learning objectives. We don't have insight objectives. We don't set up our learning interventions in a way to generate these creative insights. but I think there's a lot we can draw from the creativity research to support people in having creative insights as we train them. And maybe not as part of the training maybe as part of helping our managers. Like I think a lot of I've been thinking recently about leadership training and how that can be valuable. Like leaders should probably be supported in helping people learn and not just in helping people get this transfer of knowledge, but also to have creative insights as well. Anyway, I've been going on for a long time.
Stella:Well, what you're saying is really interesting cause I had a conversation with Inge De Waard last week, who's over here in Belgium and she was talking very much about how you actually need some kind of basic skills in order to have those kinds of insights. You actually need some knowledge first, very often. So I think sometimes you can give people knowledge and I really liked the idea of bringing knowledge i n from different areas and giving people access to information and then kind of pick and choose from it. And from that begin to identify their insights. But I think the insights often need time and in a lot of e-learning and even classroom fa ce-to-face v irtual classroom, there isn't a lot of time for the, for the reflection fo r t he insight piece to happen. So I think when you have training and it s pread over time better, then I think actively encourages reflection actually allow people time to just, you know, sit back and think, you know, have conversations, but not di rected c onversations. Just kind of wh at'd y ou think of that? And I think that's when those insight moments are more likely to happen.
Will:Oh, absolutely and it's really interesting because in the creativity research they talk about, I forget the words that they use but they talk about, it's not enough to have a bunch of unique ideas. You need to have unique ideas that are valid, relevant, true, useful, and to do that, it takes an expertise, as you said, you need to immerse yourself in a body of knowledge so that the ideas that you come up with are likely to have a positive impact. However, if you're an expert in a field that's not enough for creativity, you sort of have to go on the boundaries of your field to really bring in those creative ideas. You have to have the solid foundation. I mean, we've all seen people who come up with these wild ideas. I see it in the learning field all the time, wild ideas that are completely irresponsible, off target. They're gonna send us down some rabbit holes that we don't want to go down. So it does help to have expertise, but then you have to broaden your expertise and bring in new information outside your area of expertise. If you want to sort of bring these disparate ideas and let's think about this, you need to do this. You need to bring two ideas into working memory that weren't connected before, right. And when you connect them, that's the insight. And so how do you do that? How do you get people to think beyond what they normally think, but think in a way that's useful, productive, et cetera.
Stella:And I think that's one of the joys of social learning, isn't it? That you can actually pick up something from somebody else. It was completely serendipitous. It wasn't planned or prepared, but suddenly they come in with something that perhaps your mind is ready to take on. I think there's probably a level of readiness and they just come in with something and then those two ideas together create something beautiful and harmonious, or at least as a new idea, even if it's not peaceful and harmonious.
Will:Right. Well, absolutely. You know, the creativity research I'm really excited about it. I haven't looked at it in a while, but you know, the one thing they talk about is, okay, so once you have an idea, you sort of have to vet it and you have to sort of make sure it's okay. You know, you do that with other people through that social aspects. Hey, you know, I have this idea, tell me what you think and they tell you, and then you go, Oh, well, bad idea, or it's a good idea, but I need to tweak it and then that's not enough either, because if you have a new idea, you have to then convince other people, persuade them, and it takes a while and there's resistance to new ideas. So to be successful in having an insight that you can actually put into practice is not just about creating insights, but it's also about thinking about how to be a change manager, managing stakeholders, persuasion, persevering over time. Cause it may take time.
Stella:Well, we just made learning far more complicated than perhaps it was before.
Will:I know, sorry, everybody.
Stella:Now. I know Will, that you're really kind of very focused on making sure that we transfer learning into the workplace within it with an L&D context. I'm quite sure you're perfectly happy in your private life learning stuff, just because it seems like it's fun. But I think at work it's really important that we transfer it. So what are your sort of top takeaways for who really need to get their learning transferred into work?
Will:Well, let's think about the causal pathway. So first, we need to comprehend this new information, take it in, process of properly. We need to make sure it's vetted. U m, but then we also need to be able to remember it. And y ou k now, when we do, when we do learning design, we can do certain things to support that effort. So things like providing people with realistic practice, spaced repetitions, some triggering mechanisms as well. So that we remember it later, and then that's not enough. We have to be motivated and then we have to maybe have a social support system or a resource support system and time and all o f that stuff. So it's really, it's a process. They recently released a review of the transfer research and one of the things I'll say r ight off is I was a little bit disappointed. The quality of the transfer research I thought was better. It's not as good as we'd like it to be. There's still some good, strong recommendations but it could be better. The researchers n eeded to go beyond getting people's subjective inputs about it, but still there's some good stuff a nd recommendations. So like the s upport o f o ne's manager i n a o ne in a workplace, very important, not just afterwards, but before and during, y ou know, providing resources and time and permission and coaching. Um, t here's yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff there.
Stella:I think there's a very interesting stuff around the environment people go back into and how supportive, not just the manager is, but how supportive the environment is for whatever that new idea they've just learned. Because if it's something that's really new and yet it hasn't kind of worked its way into the culture of the organization, they may be completely committed and super keen to use this new knowledge, new skills, whatever it might be, but they may find that the environment is constantly preventing them from doing that. And unless they're incredibly persistent, the chances are they'll fall back into old ways.
Will:Yeah. Yo, Robert, I don't care what you learned in training. Here we do it this way.
Stella:Absolutely. But I think it's the subtle things. It's not just that it's the subtle things in the environment that are often preventing you from taking the action you may need to take. And you know, it's like you putting the bottle at the bottom of the stairs, are people getting those subtle cues all the time that you're saying go the new way? Or are they getting more cues that are saying no, no, no, just carry on doing what you always did.
Will:Oh, absolutely. Well, and there's structures in place too, that sort of nudge us to keep doing what we've always been doing, which keeps us safe but keeps us stuck as well. There's s a bunch of different, aspects to this. So you take it back and there is the sort of responsibility for the system. The system has an influence, right? So we, as learning and performance professionals can think about, are we creating the system in such a way that when people do go back, they're supported, right? And we don't have direct control over that, but we may have influence if we can persuade the managers that they need to do a few things to help support this. We can make sure that when people go back, they have the resources, et cetera. So that's one side of it. The system impacts, and we can have some influence over those, but there's also the learner or employee their ability. And we can do things as well. So we can help them by supporting their memory, by giving them job aids, performance support. We can also support them perhaps in being more resilient and inoculating them against obstacles. And that's one thing a lot of us don't think about, but, you know, we should, as learning professionals sort of have a sense of what kind of roadblocks they m ight come up against
Stella:That shouldn't really be the end of every training. Shouldn't it? What challenges might you face and how are we going to help you get around them?
Will:Exactly. Yeah. Let's let them brainstorm and you know, you bring some stuff in They're gonna face obstacles, everybody faces obstacles. And so we can prepare people for that. They're going to be much more likely to persevere.
Stella:So we're nearing the end of this fascinating conversation that I could probably dive deeper into in all sorts of ways. But what I'd really like to know is what do you think is the future for us in terms of learning within the business and work context, where do you think it's going?
Will:I know from experience that it's impossible to predict the future. So I'll tell you the future that I'd like to see. I've got like 90% of a book written called the CEO's guide to training e-learning and work reshaping, learning into a competitive advantage. And in that book, I'm hoping to create a better interface between our business or organizational stakeholders and us on the learning team. I feel like a lot of the issues we have are because that relationship h as broken, that our organizational stakeholders, they don't really understand learning. And because of that, they don't really ask us for what we can do. And we think that we should frame everything from their perspective in terms of business terms, et cetera. And we almost sort of forget that we have a profession, we are learning professionals and we have certain very strong skill sets that we can provide. And so I'd like to help us understand each other better. And I think that will open up a myriad of possibilities.
Stella:And I think there's probably a huge amount of people cheering you on the sidelines there. Will, thank you very much. It was really great to chat to you again. And of course, we're looking forward to continuing to work with you.
Will:It's my pleasure. Bye!
:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Please share it with your friends and colleagues and visit our website stellarlabs.eu, to learn more about what we do and how we do it tune into the next episode.